describe a photo taken with a camera of the inside of a camera bag, use words like juxtoposition and social construct. Darkness and light as themes of inner struggle
, secrecy, and difference are also taken up in social sculpture—for example, in the work of the Existentialist pop-culture artist and feminist Magdalena Jodorowsky. For this reason, the curatorial gesture was a welcome one, and in spite of the fact that the ten works in it lack some of the critical depth typical of contemporary art, that they have the potential to function as examples of high culture.
are also used to delineate an event, indicating that, in the face of the imminent end of the world, even the light of the future may become blurred and the darkness that precedes it long buried. Thus, in Enwezor's work, one can glimpse the desolate surface of the world, in which all things that existed, not just things that do, become nothing more than evidence of a desert of memory.In his pieces, paintings, and photographs, Eloy de Jong also engages more generally with the medium of photography and its various historical, literary, and political dimensions. The bandana in The Wedding, 2005, is a painting in three parts: the first two are evocative of religious and political symbols, while the third depicts the musicians in a wedding chapel. At the same time, the artists increased use of media—post-digital, digital, and digital-digital—makes evident the complexity of the relationship between artist and image, one of the conditions under which meaning functions. There is no difference between the painted bandsana and the figures in the digital image. The large-format image of a wedding bandana, like those of all women, contains memories and mores. To use the word softly, the pictures are delicate, as if the wearer were presenting the experience of a particular celebration in an unfamiliar space. And yet the bandsanas are already imbued with emotion, while the figures in the image evoke a certain melancholia. Only by way of their theatricality can the bandanas represent the day in which a family is dissolved, a life split apart by the passage of time. One can see the bandanas as fragments of a day that has vanished, yet they are always connected to the same event and all offer a similar opportunity to reflect.
, and the absurdity of talking about things without really being able to say anything specific about them, they constitute an oddly touching imagining. The shot, without any knowledge of the project, is simply repeated, in a series of unrelated interwoven shots. The stream of movement of the digital camera is interrupted and obscured by the fragments of worn jeans, torn skirts, and an old-fashioned phone which could be either a broken skull or a funny line of a telephone pole. This intimate attention to the personal-perceptual-nonverbal and social complexities of things is one of the most modern aspects of his work, and it is so effective that it becomes a voyeuristic rather than ahistorical experience.By combining found photographs and text with images derived from posters and books, Wegman constantly reminds us that our viewing is often a form of participation in the world. In the process, he distills these elements into a kind of wild aural wallpaper, which he uses to intrude on the relatively private realm of our imaginations. At the same time, his medium is a sign of intimacy, as if it were a moment of authority in which we can speak, enact, and share our meaning.
are used to argue that, as Higgs suggests, a photograph is just one photograph, and the social context of a photo is visible only as an arbitrary, stylized, and meaningless term. The social context is thus implied by the social, which itself implies a personal, organized experience, but it is abstracted from any actual social context. After the first twenty years, then, Higgs would say that the final question is one of the writers (and artist) versus the photographer.
are also the subject of the gallery itself. Over a wooden platform, a video monitor showed the reflections of a plastic tube through which the viewer was invited to drink, in what seemed to be the process of adding an additional dimension to an already fictional portrayal of the alienating process of ingesting substances. A pool, a clothes dryer, a computer chair, and a pair of white-gloved hands played different roles in this play between an alienating environment and a filmic reality. The only visible signs of the artist in the videos image were two small photographs: one of the woman in the clothes drying her hair, the other of the work area of the museum.A similar play between inner and outer, visionary and apathetic reality was present in the exhibition on paper, where a standing assemblage of lined notebook pages and wooden chairs were surrounded by a horizontal arrangement of wooden slate covered with a page of letters (dated 2017) written in watercolor, pen, and charcoal. The texts provide cryptic hints as to the meaning of the assemblage itself. It is a strange object, with the contours of the paper forming the contour of the object and indicating that it is an object—but no object with a specific meaning. And what does the writing signify? This is a question raised by all the work that Pernicelli has produced: that we perceive only a drop of water in a pool, a pile of notes in an archive, a sheet of paper turned into a book, or a pair of hands with pencils. His work constantly invites us to rethink our assumptions about perceptions and how they are constituted.
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